Eating out as a "grey nomad"
Eating is one of many people’s favourite subjects, here we’d like to go into a bit of detail about food and cooking in general as a nomad.
Food Storage and Preservation
Not all RVs have refrigeration or freezing, and those that do will require electricity to run them, which might not always be available. When you consider the space limitations that you’ll have to deal with then nomads have to rethink the way that they do food.
Consider the following options
- Dried ingredients, such as nuts, dried fruit and grains are high-density, lightweight foods that you can graze on all the time.
- Leaf vegetables, like Chinese greens and spinach, as well as cauliflower and broccoli, don’t store well, so consume them as soon as possible.
- Root vegetables and squashes like pumpkin store for a long time especially in cold conditions, but ‘a long time’ doesn’t mean ‘forever’ so don’t wait until they start sprouting before you consume them.
- Cans are wonderful for wet foods, but they are heavy, so where possible see about buying foods in UHT or Tetra Parks.
- You might be amazed at what you can accomplish with limited utensils. Clever cooks just love sharing their cleverness with other people and if you just ask around, you’ll get some great tips. For those of you who like watching videos, we have links to several below to get you inspired.
- If you can, stick to meals that are simple to prepare. This is where a slow cooker might be of great help. The great advantage of slow cooking is that you can buy cheaper but tougher cuts of meats that are more flavoursome, but that lend themselves to long, slow cooking to bring their flavours out and to tenderise them until they melt in your mouth. Slow cooking is also easy, you can just bung in a whole bunch of ingredients in the morning, set and forget, and by evening your meals are ready. Of course, you need a steady supply of power to make this work, but that’s what trailer parks and/or solar electricity are for. Slow cooked meals also freeze really easily, so leftovers become the gift that just keeps on giving.
- Alternatively, if you have above-average re-making and maintaining skills you can cook anywhere that you can get your hands on firewood, as long as you’re not using an open fire at a time or place where there’s an extreme fire danger.
- If you’re in a town for a while and have made friends and contacts with access to a kitchen, it might pay to make up a whole bunch of meals like curries, soups, stews and the like that can be frozen and reheated in a microwave later.
We’d strongly recommend getting your hands on a copy of an excellent book by Lisa Kathleen Daly, Healthy Eating for the Time Poor (New Holland, 2018). The book was written for stressed-out urban parents who want to spend far less time in the kitchen but still give their families nutritious meals, but the principles in the book can be easily applied to nomads who want to spend more time enjoying Australia and less time cooking but who don’t want to compromise too much on flavour and healthy eating. Lisa lived in Kakadu in the Northern Territory and in Monkey Mia in Western Australia for over a year, so she’s no stranger to camping and nomadding.
Credit: The Grey Nomad's Ultimate guide to Australia, New Holland Publishers, RRP $32.99 available from all good book retailers or online at www.newhollandpublishers.com